> it astounds me

This should cause you to reconsider your beliefs leading up to it.

GPT-4 (!) has, in studies comparing multiple models with humans for creativity, beaten the mean human. In comparison, even just the mean of the top 50% of humans beat the models studied in that case (link follows), but the point is that if you think the mean humans is particularly noteworthy, you've avoided the half of the population who have the creativity of a pot noodle.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-25157-3/figures/2

There's more studies out there with other types of creativity test, but the conclusion is basically the same: the best models beat the mean human, but are nowhere near as good the worst *publishable* human.

My guess is this is both why LLM slop happens and why it grates so hard: a significant number of bosses look at the output and think to themselves "wow so creative" because it's more creative than they themselves are; but those bosses weren't hired to be creative, they were hired to be a boss, and all the people who they hired to be creative are going "arg, no, can't you see how bad this is?"... but that is just a guess, I've not found any surveys comparing *management* creativity to LLMs, closest is e.g. this about decision making, not creativity: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5156585